Psychology articles dating and relationships

Researchers call your sense of whether your relationship will eventually result in marriage your commitment to wed.If you could chart the story of your relationship, what would it look like?For example, spending too much time with friends, fighting or just being too different could nudge commitment to wed down.Conversely, meeting the partner’s family, spending a lot of time together, having a lot in common and receiving positive feedback from friends or family could make commitment to wed rise.Some researchers, including Ximena Arriaga at Purdue University, have suggested that the typical method of measuring a single moment in time may not fully capture the relationship experience; it might be more revealing to look at patterns of change as the relationship develops.To know your relationship’s fate, the ups and downs may matter more than its quality at one specific moment.The Conversation UK receives funding from Hefce, Hefcw, SAGE, SFC, RCUK, The Nuffield Foundation, The Ogden Trust, The Royal Society, The Wellcome Trust, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The Alliance for Useful Evidence, as well as sixty five university members.

Participants also provided information about changes in relationship status – such as transitioning from dating to broken up, from casual to serious dating, from serious dating to engaged, and so on.

At some point in every dating relationship, you ask yourself some version of these questions.

the one to introduce to my parents, the one to move in with, the one to start a family with, the one to marry?

Much like boiling your entire personality down into a color or series of letters, fitting your relationship into one of four tidy categories has intuitive appeal. Our relationships and psychological experiences are complex in a way that defies basic categories or groups; every relationship cannot fit neatly within these four categories.

However, they provide one framework for understanding how relationships progress. Importantly, knowing how commitment to wed changed over time was a better predictor of relationship outcomes than the basic measure of relationship quality at the first interview.